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EPL At first glance, the kid in the footage looks like he’s playing in the wrong age group. The red shirt seems several sizes too large and the top of the boy’s afro barely reaches his opponents’ chests. But then the 11-year-old Oscar Bobb starts to move, gliding gracefully past players, the ball under complete control. It is as if they don’t even know he was there. Advertisement Jump cut to three weeks ago. Bobb, now 22 and wearing the sky blue of Manchester City, is seemingly lost in a cul-de-sac of five Wolves defenders. To his childhood coach at Norwegian club Lyn, Mikael Aeserud, what happened next was uncannily familiar: the speed and grace of the footwork, the ease with which he slides past the defenders. “It was the exact same thing I saw him do at that age, ” Aeserud tells The Athletic. “It was the Norway Cup, so there were players from all over the country but, with every game, more and more members of the public and scouts were coming to our pitch just to see Oscar. “We called him ‘the little wizard’ because he could do things nobody else could — although we never said that to him. ” There was another nickname for this prodigious talent. TV2, Norway’s biggest national broadcaster, featured Bobb at the Norway Cup for three years running, producing a highlights package titled ‘Little Messi’. Bobb’s talent was magnetic. Aeserud recalls how, at youth tournaments, spectators who started watching games on other pitches would be drawn to the hubbub around the Lyn game and end up spellbound by ‘the little wizard’. Among those spectators were scouts from every top club in Europe. Rival managers just gave up trying to stop him and admired the show. “The other coach was trying to fire up his team to win the tackles and be aggressive, ” says Aeserud. “Then Oscar dribbled past everyone three times to put us 3-0 up in 10 minutes. The other coach walked up to us and said, ‘Do you know what? I’ll just give up and will come stand next to you to enjoy what I’m watching’. “Oscar would take the courage out of teams — he was that gifted. ” It was clear that the diminutive kid had outgrown his local level in Norway. A move to one of the biggest clubs in Europe seemed inevitable. And then he disappeared. Bobb has started all three of Manchester City’s Premier League games this season and, going into the Manchester derby on Sunday, looks like his team’s most dangerous attacking player. It is an admirable comeback. This time last year, he was still in plaster, recovering from a broken leg sustained while executing a turn on the training ground, just when it looked like he had forced his way into Pep Guardiola’s starting XI. Advertisement Many young players might have struggled to overcome such a setback, but Bobb had already navigated his fair share of adversity. Bobb was raised by his mother, Turid Gunnes, who had sole custody of him. She’s a distinguished actress in Norway, who has recently returned to the stage after a decade away, performing a one-woman monologue inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Gunnes credits her son with helping her to conquer her performance anxiety. But not so long ago, it was Bobb’s footballing career that was suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. In 2015, when Bobb was 12, they moved to Porto. For the preceding two years, Gunnes had travelled to the Portuguese city to work with PELE — a theatre company that organises projects for disadvantaged kids — before finding a permanent position with a dance-theatre company. She arranged for her son to join the academy at Porto. FIFA blocked Porto’s attempt to sign Bobb in November 2015, citing Article 19 of its rulebook, which prohibits the transfer of minors unless the player’s parents move to the new country for non-football reasons.   Gunnes argued this is what she did. FIFA disagreed. Porto had first seen the nine-year-old Bobb play at a youth tournament called Mundialito, held in the Algarve. Gunnes said she had exploratory talks with PELE a month prior, so she provisionally asked Porto whether her son could train with them if she was in the city for work. Porto agreed and Bobb went on to represent the club at international tournaments in June 2013, June 2014, and March 2015. However, Porto’s bid to officially register Bobb in January 2016, based on his mother’s occupation qualifying as an Article 19 exception, was rejected by FIFA. A month later, a much smaller Porto-based club, Escola de Futebol Hernani Goncalves, tried to register Bobb. Again, FIFA rejected the registration. Advertisement Bobb was allowed to train with Porto as an unregistered player, but it was a deeply unsatisfying situation for a kid who lived and breathed competitive football. Porto tried to find creative ways of developing his talent. They organised extra training sessions, internal matches, friendly fixtures, and additional tournaments to give him game time. He even had a dedicated coach who looked after his development. Bobb studied at a private international school and was speaking fluent Portuguese within a year. His father, Abdou, visited him for long periods to offer support. The challenges around his registration and learning to live in a new country developed his resilience. He may have disappeared from the official record, but scouts in England, Germany and Spain had not forgotten him and continued to contact those close to the player to find out which ‘unofficial’ tournament or friendly he would be playing in. Bobb’s talent did not appear diminished by the lack of competitive football. He was so good that when he would weave his way through a crowd of defenders, his Porto coach apparently used to go behind the bench and laugh so the other kids didn’t see.   Bobb wanted to play competitive football matches, though. The smaller Porto-based club, Goncalves, had lodged an appeal and two years after the initial FIFA ruling, the case reached the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). The sole arbitrator, Sofoklis Pilavios, found in FIFA’s favour. He ruled that, as the first contact between the club and player was initiated over a year before his mother’s first official contract, it suggested football was at least part of the motivation behind the move to Porto. Bobb faced a choice. It was either another 18 months in football limbo in Porto, until he turned 16 and could finally sign for a club. Or he could move back to Norway without his mother. Neither seemed viable. Advertisement So, after over two and a half years as a footballing refugee, Gunnes decided to quit her job and take her son home. Back in Oslo, there was another choice to make. Former club Lyn might have been the obvious destination but they were struggling financially. Valerenga made a persuasive case as the biggest and best club in the city. It was the right club to meet his ambitions. Just when it looked like the long wait for competitive football was over, misfortune struck again, this time with injury. “He played a maximum of 10 games in that year and a half, ” says Thomas Hasselgren, Valerenga’s academy director at the time. Bobb didn’t train for seven or eight months at one point due to injury. He was caught in a cycle of rehab, three or four weeks training, relapse and more rehab. Valerenga came to a special agreement with the first team that they could use their medical staff to help him but each time he built his leg back up, another issue flared. “We saw he had something extra and knew he could definitely play top division in Norway, ” says Hasselgren. “But it was difficult to say then that three or four years later he would play for one of the best teams in the world. ” Manchester City thought differently. City first became aware of Bobb when he was still at Lyn. Club scout Stewart Thompson travelled to Norway to watch him in action after the club had been tipped off about his brilliance. City’s youth scouting reports are graded from A to D, and the top grade is reserved only for very special performances. On that day, there was no question of Bobb getting anything other than an A. City were primed to go after him when the time was right. After Bobb’s lost years in Portugal, City representatives visited Valerenga several times in the early months of 2019, meeting the player and watching him in training. They even provided some tips on how to manage Bobb’s injuries and, on one occasion, brought a medic with them to assess the player. Advertisement City invited him and his family over to get to know the club. On one chance encounter, while attending a Spurs match, he bumped into Pep Guardiola while being shown the first-team steps. The manager, whose hair has long deserted him, took one look at the teenager’s voluminous afro and joked that he could do with borrowing some of it.    Guardiola has taken a strong liking to Bobb. He admires Bobb’s instinctive flair and the way that is allied to an ability to adhere to instructions, a combination essential to a winger in a Guardiola team. This combination is what struck Pal Arne Johansen, who was Bobb’s Norway national team coach at under-18 and under-19 level. “He is a reflective guy and I saw the same on the pitch, the rare combination between structure and creativity, ” he says. “Oscar isn’t the loudest but you want to get close to him and play with him. Young players like him have played with older players their whole life so it’s not as natural for them to be leaders, so what we worked on with a lot of our best youth players was on them being responsible for making the movement between the other players fluent. ” Guardiola’s decision to start Bobb in last season’s Community Shield signalled how highly he regards him, and it was only an unfortunate injury that delayed his entry to the starting XI. “It is such a proud moment now that he is establishing himself because he is such a cracking guy to work with and wants to do so well, ” his former Manchester City under-18 coach Gareth Taylor tells The Athletic. “Oscar’s mindset now when I speak to him is completely different to the young boy who came across from Norway.   He was quite a shy lad, initially. We had to work on his confidence a little bit when he came across. “You could see the skill level was there but at under-18 we had to encourage him to try things and understand that not everything he tries is going to come off. It didn’t matter if he made mistakes. ” While his technical ability was undeniable, there were concerns about his physicality. Bobb found himself alongside Cole Palmer as a second-year scholar, still playing at under-18 level instead of being promoted to a higher age group. Advertisement “We realised working with Phil Foden, Cole Palmer and him, these diminutive players, we had to allow them time to develop and gain the physical elements that all three now have, ” says Taylor. “The message from the top was that these guys need to play in central areas to get the necessary scanning techniques they need, not by pushing them out wide until they develop into athletes. “Bravery to take the ball anywhere is Oscar’s trademark. ” Bravery is also a good way to describe the way Bobb navigated what was effectively a four-year hiatus from registered football games between 2015 and 2019, during which he played only a handful of matches. It could have ended the career of a less determined player. But there is one theory among those who know him that it actually ight have been inadvertently beneficial, helping to insulate him from the pressures of his early stardom. “I’ve seen some players become sick of football with the attention and pressure, but Oscar avoided the attention that Odegaard received because he left Norway before making a senior appearance, ” says Aeserud. “I liked the idea that he left Norway at that age. In Norway, it would have been tough with this hype around him all the time. He needed to have a calmer youth so taking the tougher academy path was good for him and allowed him to live like a kid. ” His mother still splits her time between Porto and Oslo. She has a house in Porto, still acts there, and met her current partner there, an indicator that the city did perhaps hold more than just a key to footballing stardom for her son. These days, Bobb goes back to holiday there whenever he can, and still dreams of playing in Portugal one day. Based on the level he is showing this season, it may be some years before he is looking anywhere other than starring for Manchester City. (Top photo: Jack Thomas/UEFA via Getty Images) Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle Jordan Campbell is a football writer for The Athletic, who regularly covers Manchester City. In 2024, he was named in the 30 to Watch journalism awards. He previously covered Glasgow Rangers and was twice nominated for Young Journalist of the Year at the Scottish Press Awards. Follow Jordan on Twitter @Jordan C1107